How do I identify and deal with waste-of-time assignments?

Question

I'm a college student with an interest in tutoring and eventually teaching. I spend a lot of time in class watching my classmates get confused and thinking of better ways to teach the material; I have a background in public policy and have in other capacities spent a fair amount of time explaining complex concepts to people (legislators, people in unrelated departments, students next?) without the background knowledge to understand those concepts if given technical jargon.

That's all good, but I found another problem: as an instructor, how do I identify and deal with assignments that are just a waste of time?

I've noticed this with some courses. In one particular course, we had a semester-long assignment on a topic we didn't cover in class; rather, there is a reading assignment and a number of extremely trivial but time-consuming mini assignments (like, 6 in one day) given as homework. Overall, the semester-long project demands we learn the topic; while the assignments along the way seem to demand a lot of time for little if any learning. Some students did their projects but lost a lot of their grade because they never did any of the homework, which is bizarre.

I'm not sure this tests learning, or is conducive to learning. How do I determine if such work is helping students learn or just wasting their time? Wasted time could better be spent on something else, whether something that actually helps the student learn (the given course or another concurrent course) or just leisure so they don't burn out. How do educators normally determine if the assignments they give students maximizes their learning or if it gets in the way?

(This is probably related to the question about lectures, considering in some classes 2/3 of the students skip the lecture because it's worth more to study in groups during that time.)

Answer 1

A strategy I have found quite useful is to spell out what I want my students to learn on the syllabus that is distributed on day 1 of the class (the "learning outcomes"), and to take the task of writing these learning objectives seriously -- what do I want my students to know and be able to do when the class is over?

Then, when I write homework, I check every homework assignment against the list of learning outcomes. It is easy to write assignments because they just seem related to the topics we're covering in class ("apply this theorem to this situation"), but many of the assignments I come up this way do not make the cut because being able to do rote work is not really what I'm after; the problems that survive the comparison against the learning objectives tend to be the ones that let students explore things from a different angle, connect to material they have learned in previous classes, etc. These are the problems that I find it worthwhile letting my students work on.

I tend to do the same with exam questions. My goal with exam questions is that students walk away from an exam and can say "I learned something today".

Answer 2

This question is extremely broad in practice. How do instructors ascertain the utility of their assignments is? Trial and error, more or less. You must obtain data from such trials somewhere:

• Your own trials and assessments of exercises you assign in your own courses.
• Your own analysis of assessments and assignments you have been given in the same or similar courses.
• Anecdotes from colleagues on trial and assessments of exercises they assigned in their own courses.
• Trials and assessments of exercises done by education researchers who report on their findings.

I've heard of no quick and easy recipes for synthesizing the available information into a prediction of the usefulness about any given assignment.

Defining "learning" in a precise and nontrivial way is hard. Also, assignments are not undertaken in isolation: Each student's background, the context of their other assignments both in the same course and others, the course objectives, and the class schedule all impact and constrain what might be effective.

A few additional comments:

I've noticed this with some courses...

When analyzing personal experiences and anecdotes, being as precise as possible about your positive and negative criticism may be most useful in the future. You've started on this: In the context of the course, what do you think the learning objective(s) of the assignment you described were? What aspects of the assignment contributed positively to your accomplishing those learning objectives? Why? What contributed negatively, and why?

For instance, I can't tell from your description whether you considered the micro-assignments were too easy, too long, or were assigned on too rigid a schedule.

• In the first case, the assignment did not prompt you to engage in additional activities which contributed to a learning objective that you would have otherwise not done.
• In the second case, the assignments prompted you towards activities that significantly helped accomplish a learning objective, but you think you would've accomplished the same or similar with significantly less.
• In the third case, the assignments prompted you towards useful activities you would not have otherwise undertaken, but you're confident you could have completed them at the same average rate given more flexibility.

I have a background in public policy and have in other capacities spent a fair amount of time explaining complex concepts to people (legislators, people in unrelated departments, students next?) without the background knowledge to understand those concepts if given technical jargon.

You know this, but it seems worth saying. Your background would probably be very useful to as an instructor, but the objectives and constraints of a college instructor are very different from a legislative adviser. Don't put the cart before the horse, however. Your instructors may be a lot more effective at accomplishing their objectives given the context than you notice as a student.

Decision-makers need to construct very rapidly a mental model of a technical subject that lets them make reasonable decisions related to it. College students have several years to develop a whole range of skills, including quite high-fidelity understanding of several subjects in a whole field of knowledge. You cannot be spared from learning precise language if a subject is incomprehensible without it.

Some students did their projects but lost a lot of their grade because they never did any of the homework, which is bizarre.

This does not sound so bizarre to me. It's very hard to determine whether this outcome is within parameters except without the whole class's performance, and hopefully data from previous runs.

One of the major tangential objectives/constraints of teaching classes of students who are predominantly 18-22 years old directly out of high school is promoting a level of personal responsibility where people can be successful as adults. A substantial number of students come in without robust mechanisms to keep up with and finish their assignments effectively. Usually it's exactly short/small/frequent assignments that aren't repeatedly announced in lectures where this problem turns up.

Trying to promote responsibility in a reasonable way for those who need it without driving those who don't up the wall is a constant tension. Break content into too many small pieces that are due very often and those who can handle their schedules more effectively are frustrated. Break content into too few big pieces that are due infrequently and many students overestimate their progress due to lack of feedback.